Eleven Short Pieces About People And Trains

The issue with trains in this country is that they run badly at the best of times and fail to work at all when something goes wrong. I'm stood on the platform at Wembley Central right this second after being thrown off a train as a result of some selfish soul throwing themselves under a train at Harrow & Wealdstone.

On this train line there are four lines – a set of fast lines going north and a corresponding set of lines heading south. The width of two sets of train lines must be, I don't know, twenty feet. That's a forty foot track width. Assuming this incident happened at the station itself, there's a platform dividing the north / south lines and that must measure about twenty foot also.

A person, even if compressed under a train, could not cover two sets of tracks and a platform. So please forgive me for not comprehending why it is that a train could not pass along one set of lines while the other is blocked. But this is precisely how the powers that be handle something like this – total shutdown. No trains are allowed to move anywhere, Euston is at a total standstill and according to my friend Paul who is currently at Euston, they're telling what must be an absolute throng of commuters that there will be no trains until at least 8.30. I've been here at Wembley since 5.30 and it's now 6.30. Seems like a huge wait for one solitary fatality.

No trains from the North West can get through because they've got to pass through Harrow to get to London. I couldn't even begin to imagine how many passengers are being inconvenienced this evening given that this affects travellers from Glasgow right down to London, but one person has caused a heck of a lot of people a lot of frustration this sticky July evening.

For me, this represents something of a comeuppance. I was in Bournemouth today meeting an IFA with a fund manager from our office. I've been meaning to take this particular fund manager out to lunch for a while to massage his ego and say thanks for a year of support. To what now appears to be my detriment, we chose today for his convenience since he lives in Bournemouth. What I thought was supposed to be a quick sandwich and a chat turned into a three course meal and a full-blown meeting. This meant that I left Bournemouth much later than anticipated, slightly worse for wear and much to the disappointment of my wife, and caught a much later train from Euston back home. If you've ever seen My Name Is Earl, you might well call this karma; bad things happen because you've done bad things.

Predictably, and understandably, I am well and truly in the doghouse over this at home. I have missed my daughter's bedtime, which often leads to her having an unsettled night's sleep. I'm also not going to be around to cook dinner for my wife who really needs to be resting after a day of sickness and looking after a one year old who is running her into the ground.

But hey, it's seven now and we're moving again. It sucks to have been delayed so long, but at least it's earlier than 8.30 and at least I won't be camping out at Wembley.

***

A girl is facing me from the other side of the aisle, applying makeup using her mobile phone as a mirror. Layer after layer goes on, and I'll admit that she was pretty around layer number three, but for all the attention lavished on her face her hair was lank and messy, more like a female mullet than anything fashionable. And she keeps looking at me and is smiling with her eyes, and all I can think of is: please brush your hair. She did eventually and it looked worse than before.

***

It’s a warm day. An older lady opposite me on the tube is taking an age to eat a Mars chocolate bar, each mouthful thoroughly masticated while the chocolate must be melting into nothing in her hand. The front of her right shoe is scuffed right down to the soft brown leather underneath the outer colour, and she's wearing a full coat despite the heat. She is taking up two seats, one with herself the other with a handbag. She's got a shopping trolley hung on the handle of the door that perilously crosses into the next carriage. She has quite a sinister stare, as if she's embittered with the world. The tube pulls up at Barbican and the doors ponderously open. Only then does she start to move, shoving the Mars in her coat pocket as she picks up her bags, then very casually strolls off the train as if it's jolly well going to wait for her before signalling that it's going to move on. She makes it, but only just.

At the next stop, Farringdon, a woman all in white, wearing shorts that were far too short and a blouse that was cut far too low, takes her seat. She's wearing red flip-flops, and carrying a trolley case in one hand and a massive floppy hat in the other. When she sits down the case goes next to her seat and the hat rests in her lap. It's so wide-brimmed that from where I'm sitting all I can see is her skin because of the short shorts and low top and so she appears to be wearing nothing.

***

On the train home, the guy next to me is working on financial spreadsheets on a laptop. He takes a break, pulls the screen closer so that me and the guy next to him can't see (by doing it he's attracted attention and so I take a look out of the corner of my eye) and pulls up a load of hardcore pornography on the screen, not accidentally but deliberately and flicks through it all until he reaches the end of the slideshow, adjusts himself then goes back to his financial modelling. I can't believe someone would do this in the rush hour, but it was at least more interesting than the spreadsheets.

***

I had breakfast with my sister this morning at a hotel near Pimlico Underground station. I couldn't face a fry-up; I've always been a bit funny about cooked breakfasts in places that I haven't been to before, and even more so when I can see into the kitchens like I could when Natalie and I went to the buffet to load up. It's a strange thing to get anxious about, but a constant whenever I go somewhere new; for some reason too the sight of loads of food laid out like this makes me really ill, like I'm going to have to eat it all. I drank far too much coffee, leaving me with a horrible feeling in my mouth. I don't see Natalie often enough and I didn't see her for long enough this morning.

Saying farewell at Pimlico, I took the Victoria Line to Oxford Circus. I'm always amazed at London's second 'rush hour', consisting of the last stragglers going to work plus the intransient population who've just eaten their breakfast and are ready to hit the tourist attractions of the city at the same time. They're all sat there with their identical maps, trying to work out where they need to get off to see the sights, or peering up at the tube maps on the curved ceilings of the carriage for validation that they are actually heading the right way.

***

As if it wasn't bad enough that she basically sat on my arm when she got on the train, and then proceeded to talk her bland friend and celebrity gossip down the phone as loud as she liked, she then started playing with her ponytail like some kid of about five years old, giving it five twizzles with her forefinger and thumb before pushing the end of the stubby little tail into her ear; all the while she's doing it she's sucking her thumb. She then stops, perhaps realises that she's about fifteen years older than the person she's acting like, and then starts again. There are some irritating people in this world. I find myself shaking my head in disbelief at how annoying and immature she is which prompts a female passenger opposite to laugh at me and causes me to roll my eyes.

***

I sat opposite a very pretty woman on the tube this morning. She was listening to her iPod. Toward the end of the journey from Euston Square to Liverpool Street she flicked through the playlist – the 'clicker' volume was up, but because she was attractive I didn't find myself getting annoyed like I would normally – and changed the track. Her brown eyes then started to moisten and her lip began to tremble, so this song obviously meant something to her. She stayed on the train when I alighted at Liverpool Street and I'll never know whether she properly burst into tears, but it touched me to see someone so emotional in a city so often, and so necessarily, devoid of feeling.

***

One is a guy eking out an existence asking for people to give him their used travel cards, he claims, to enable him to get to work. I have no issue with this – it facilitates a redistribution of a 24-hour permit where more than one person could use a travel card without lining the pockets of TFL. It’s a bit like the generous individuals who hand you their all-day parking permit when leaving the car park before it’s due to run out. TFL and NCP only advise you not to pass these permits only in a draconian attempt to make more money, someone once said to me and I have to say that I agree. Someone also said it funds drug abuse as they then sell the tickets they’ve just got for free to someone else. Drugs must be cheap these days.

The other is a Malcolm McLaren look-alike who travels first class, dresses in jackets from Aquascutum in large, exploded check in the manner of a Teddy Boy / Dandy mutation, who pronounces the 'th' correctly in the name of his friend, Anthony, and who insists on slamming the slide door to the first class carriage whenever the guard leaves it slightly ajar.

***

Am I the only one who gets annoyed with pedestrians who walk at a slower pace than me? I've just followed a woman down the stairs at Euston Square who seemed to have no idea whatsoever that there was a queue of people like me behind her who don't want to meander their way to the Tube during the rush-hour. I attribute this to one thing – ridiculous heels that mean their wearers can only move at the slowest possible speeds.

***

There's a potentially pretty petite girl – blonde, freckled and lightly tanned – sat opposite me on the train home. She's wearing her hair half up, half down and is wearing a long royal blue knitted top with button down shoulder straps and flecks of glitter over a black T-shirt with leggings tucked into dark brown fur-lined boots, one leg folded neatly over the other. At her feet sits a huge bronze-coloured handbag. She seems, to me in my naivety, exquisitely fashionable. But, really, what do I know? Is she wearing this Autumn's colours and textures, last year's or even next year's? Does this flatter her figure or is this a huge faux pas on her part? These are things I ponder to myself, pointlessly I have to admit.

She's reading a copy of today's The London Paper and folding each page back crisply and meticulously. None of this is particularly new or original; you see trendy young things absorbed in that rag day in, day out on this journey, although her obsessively neat folding is somewhat and uncharacteristically neurotic perhaps. Tidy paper, tidy mind I guess. What surprises me is that we're currently twenty minutes into this train journey and yet she's only made it to page five and even allowing for reading every single word, the cereal bar she ate after completing page three and the brief call she made to someone from her BlackBerry Pearl, that's an incredible amount of time to spend reading the largely empty pages of this free paper when I read it nearly in its entirety earlier between Liverpool Street and Farringdon (three stops or six minutes). What did I miss, I wonder, that has captivated this girl's attention and is causing her to furrow her brow at every article?

***

I couldn't get out of bed early enough this morning to catch my usual 06.43 train and so left the house later than normal, chided by a crow on the roof of the house opposite that seemed determined to wake the rest of the street at this ungodly hour. At the station I bumped into my friends Paul and Matthew but as they both travel on first class tickets whereas I, a mere pauper, can barely afford standard, I elected to take a different train which was by then pulling onto the opposite platform prompting me to leg it back up the stairs, over the bridge and down onto platform two with seconds to spare.

On the packed, but otherwise silent train, seats were few and far between. At Bletchley, two young, arrogant well-groomed City boys jumped on. One sat behind me, the other next to me across the aisle. In a complete absence of spatial awareness, the two struck up a conversation about girls, sport and so on, which although not especially loud, was audible over my iPod even at a moderate volume. Because of the stillness elsewhere in the carriage the conversation seemed frustratingly louder than it actually was, and any second I expected someone to berate these two for not realising that their conversation was distracting for those around me – readers, sleepers, BlackBerry addicts – but no-one does; one of the guys gets off at Watford Junction and peace once again descends on the carriage as we head on toward London.